PEACEKEEPING INTELLIGENCE: Emerging Concepts for the Future
Chapter 7—Richard J. Aldrich
From Ireland to Bosnia:
Intelligence Support for UK Low
Intensity Operations
Richard J. Aldrich
Introduction
Why compare the UK experience with intelligence support to low intensity
operations in Ireland and in Bosnia? While both deployments involved divided
states and multiple factions, and although both deployments encountered
‘mission creep’, significant differences obtain. Ireland was primarily an internal
security problem and was dominated by a mixture of aid to the civil power and
counter-terrorist activities, while Bosnia was, at first glance, an international
situation that involved peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, policing and
monitoring. Although both deployments involved diverse activities, the
emphasis was quite different. Moreover, in Ireland activities were unilateral and
under national command, in Bosnia they formed part of international and
latterly, multinational operations.1
Notwithstanding this, two arguments are advanced here to suggest that there is
value in connecting and comparing UK intelligence experiences in these two
environments. Firstly, we must consider the boundaries between different sorts
of low intensity operations. Much abstracted writing suggests that many postcold war tasks are not only ‘new’ but also specific in their nature. A literature
now exists on humanitarian operations and peace operations that is very
different to the counter-insurgency literature of the 1970s and 1980s. In
particular, there now exists a significant body of writing on the discrete issue of
intelligence support for peacekeeping.2 By contrast, Thomas Mockaitis
recently argued that most low intensity operations enjoy a generic quality that
crosses boundaries between specific tasks. Old operations of counterinsurgency were often complemented by humanitarian assistance, while recent
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peace operations, typically in Somalia, look like counter-insurgency. He asks,
are peace enforcement and peacemaking just ‘new names for old games’? More
specifically, Mockaitis has argued that peace enforcement, like
counterinsurgency or even conventional war are ultimately all military
operations. Like all military operations, they require two things to succeed: the
resources to accomplish the mission and the political will to see the mission
through to a successful conclusion.
Mockaitis’s arguments have a bearing on intelligence support to low intensity
operations. Indeed, the impact of intelligence reinforces the argument about the
generic quality of low intensity operations. All low intensity operations have
substantial generic psychological dimensions and constitute a test of political
will. Unpleasant surprises quickly erode national political will or coalition
solidarity that are vital to sustaining both peacekeeping and counterinsurgency.
(The events in Somalia in 1993 are but one illustration of this.) Good
intelligence can offer a cushion against the unexpected. Intelligence also allows
the efficient deployment of resources. David Kahn has recently argued that the
most promising avenue towards a substantive theoretical definition of
intelligence lies in the realm of economic theories that conceive of intelligence
as the kind of information that permits the most efficient action.3 Again this
has importance for peacekeeping and counterinsurgency operations, where
resources and personnel are often notoriously thin. This was never more so than
in Bosnia where small numbers of peacekeepers were scattered across a vast
and difficult terrain. Arguably, while intelligence is important for all kinds of
military operations, it is of additional importance for low intensity operations
because of these general characteristics.4
The second reason for comparing Ireland and Bosnia is to trace the impact of
policy learning. UK intelligence had operated in Ireland for decades but found
itself in the unfamiliar territory of Yugoslavia at very short notice. Under the
pressure of these adversities, UK intelligence repeatedly drew on its experience
in Ireland to inform its activities in Bosnia, simply because this was what it
knew best. Practitioners themselves made the comparison at the time and
continued to make the comparison in the context of other operations such as
Kosovo and Macedonia. When UK troops arrived in Kosovo one of the first
thing that Richard Holbrooke reportedly asked them was ‘What would you do if
you were in Northern Ireland?’ This was a question to which the UK contingent
had plenty of ready answers, although they were not all appropriate to the local
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situation. Such longitudinal comparisons are methodologically
problematic, but they are also potentially more interesting.5
more
This chapter suggests that the UK deployment in Ireland, a uniquely
intelligence-led area of activity, has been critically important in terms of
shaping how UK intelligence thinks about all low intensity operations. This
importance is partly explained by the simple fact that UK forces have been
there so long. Over a period of three and a half decades of continuous
operations they achieved what they had not achieved elsewhere, a learning
curve that involved not only individual experience but also institutionalised
learning, constructed upon detailed operational analysis. Moreover, the
sophistication required of UK forces by the 1980s was considerable, given that
the opposition also ‘learned lessons’ and had raised the level of its ‘game’. As a
result, the British Army had developed a depth of expertise in the running of
both technical and human intelligence operations. This is in marked contrast to
almost every other low intensity operations that Britain has been involved in
since 1945, where lessons were often learned and then lost.6
One obvious obstacle to meaningful comparison is the issue of unilateralism
versus multilateralism, a difference that has already been alluded to. In Bosnia,
the UK was working in the context of UNPROFOR, IFOR and eventually
SFOR which created unique problems that arose out of international liaison and
intelligence sharing amongst troop contributing nations. Moreover, the UN
itself proved to be ‘allergic’ to intelligence, presenting further problems. But as
this chapter seeks to suggest, activities in Ireland required more international
co-operation than has previously been appreciated. Meanwhile, security
constraints in Bosnia meant that, for some states, the flow of intelligence was
primarily national. Indeed, for the UK, intelligence sharing mostly consisted of
traditional bilateral Anglo-American exchange. Meanwhile, in Ireland and
Bosnia the scale of UK deployment was quite similar. In Ireland, the British
Army despatched 3,000 troops in August of 1969, rising to 32,000 at the height
of the troubles in 1972. Since then the British Army have deployed between
11,000 to 26,000 troops in Ireland at any given moment. In 2002 there were
16,000 troops in Ireland. Similarly, the British Army had 16,000 troops in
Yugoslavia in 1990s. In 2002 it had 2,000 troops in Bosnia, 3,200 in Kosovo
and some 200 in Macedonia. Significantly, in both Ireland and Bosnia, UK
forces were often spread thin.
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Did these ‘Irish lessons’ result in an overall improvement in the intelligence
aspects of UK low intensity operations doctrine? Or have they resulted in a
situation in which UK forces enjoy overweening arrogance, while at the same
time preparing for the last war, rather than the next. It is easier to reflect on the
past than to correctly anticipate the future, or as Michael Howard once put it,
historical analogies are a lazy substitute for hard analytical thought.7 Does
comparison of everything with Ireland, as some serving officers are inclined to
do, lead to misplaced confidence? Certainly in UK military academies one does
not have to search for long to find an officer who will argue that having
‘defeated’ the Irish paramilitaries through an intelligence-led campaign, dealing
with the aftermath of conflicts in the Gulf, Bosnia and Afghanistan was fairly
straightforward.
In this chapter, comparisons are pursued at three levels. First, the macro level
considering intelligence support to political, strategic and diplomatic
developments. Second, at the mid-level, reviewing the place of intelligence in
operational and logistical concerns. Finally some attention is given to the micro
level where intelligence interfaces with tactical or training issues, together with
matters of administering humanitarian assistance on the ground.
At the Top, Intelligence at the Macro Level
Political intelligence provides the most obvious area of commonality. In both
Ireland and Bosnia complex and highly factionalised situations needed strong
intelligence to support negotiations directly. Intelligence was employed to
identify opportunities and appropriate time phases for negotiation to be brought
forward. Intelligence also supported operations designed to bring hostilities
temporarily to a low enough level and to keep them at a low enough level for
negotiations to succeed, or to thwart the efforts of elements who were working
in an instrumental way to disrupt negotiations. In both cases, intelligence
agencies not only supported negotiation but negotiated, through the provision
of the additional service of ‘para-diplomacy’, allowing contact to be kept open
with parties who would rather not be seen talking to each other openly. This is a
time-honoured tradition, exemplified by the use of Britain’s SIS to talk to
Germany during the Second World War and the American use of the CIA to
talk to Communist China during major international conferences in the 1950s
when Washington did not recognise the People’s Republic and did not maintain
diplomatic relations. Similarly, for years the UK government kept open lines of
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political communication to the IRA, sometime through SIS officers operating
out of Dublin. The existence of these conversations at the height of communal
tensions in Ireland would have caused a public outcry. Nevertheless, the
continued dialogue was essential to the long-term building of mutual
confidence between opponents. Intelligence cannot solve deep-seated political
problems of divided communities, but it can build institutional trust between
negotiating parties.8
Intelligence has a strong role to play in supporting policy-makers attempting to
negotiate solutions to bitterly divided communities. In both Ireland and Bosnia,
policy makers often entered negotiations at short notice and with only limited
knowledge of the local situation. Additionally, when a large number of diverse
organisations are engaged in a broad political, economic, informational, and
military effort to bring peace and stability to specified peoples the need for
sophisticated intelligence fusion is very apparent. Here, it has been argued,
timely intelligence can play an ‘educational’ role in emphasising the extent to
which the conflicts were not only political but also multinational, multiorganisational, multi-dimensional, and multi-cultural. Good intelligence is
needed to support working effectively in a complex environment and to
encourage ‘mind-set adjustments that will allow leaders to be comfortable with
political ambiguity and at ease as part of a synergistic process.’9
The relationship of intelligence and senior political or administrative figures
engaged in negotiation is not always a comfortable one. While many came to
appreciate the importance of detailed briefings and timely political intelligence
in the context of both Ireland and Bosnia, in both cases it was sometimes
difficult to extract high-level approval for necessary operations or for clear
guidance that allowed agencies to work with confidence. Intelligence gathering
in such highly charged situations involves the continual taking of calculated
risks, something which rarefied policy animals were sometimes unable to
appreciate. Aggressive intelligence gathering, where it occurred, in both Ireland
and Bosnia, tended to originate at the mid-level from those managers who
appreciated its value, rather than from the highest level where caution often
prevailed.
Intelligence gathering was complicated by continual shifting of objectives. In
modern parlance this has become known as ‘mission creep’, but it was also
observable in Ireland in the 1970s as the UK military presence expanded and
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became more permanent. UNPROFOR’s mission in Bosnia was blurred from
the start and while it emphasised providing humanitarian aid together with
protection and security, it permitted a degree of peacemaking where this was
required to fulfil the mission. The perception of the outside world was that the
other functions were being performed, including covert assistance to favoured
factions. Different missions required different sorts of intelligence and were
hard to mix. Matters were especially complex when a shift occurred from
intelligence gathering to covert action. Efforts to influence the situation on the
ground almost always involved co-operation with factions. As the UK
discovered in Ireland and as the US discovered in Bosnia, intelligence played a
large part in subterranean support for favoured factions. Both found returning to
the previous state of impartiality is nigh impossible.
Intelligence support in the initial stages of most low intensity operations tends
to follow a familiar pattern. Policy-makers inhabit an optimistic world and
prefer to anticipate activities which are short-lived and low-cost. Contrary to
initial expectations, the operations in Ireland and Bosnia were neither. This
presumption tends to lead to poor intelligence investment at the outset precisely
when a strong information flow would be most valuable. Intelligence
operations, especially human agent operations, are intrinsically long-term and
do not respond well to the stop-go atmosphere of crisis and response. But this is
no excuse for minimising intelligence support and this mistake was made by the
UK in 1969 when Whitehall believed that 3.000 troops would go to Ireland on a
temporary basis. Thereafter, the UK forces stayed for a period of more than
three decades in which a third of a million soldiers have done duty in the
province. Similarly in Yugoslavia, UK forces stayed in Bosnia for longer than
expected and the Kosovo deployment was bigger than originally anticipated.
Intelligence operations in the wake of these deployments have had to run hard
to catch up.
General Sir Roderick Cordy-Simpson, who was variously General Sir Michael
Rose’s Director of Operation and Chief of Staff in Bosnia, expressed himself
on the problem of intelligence prior to arrival in Bosnia very frankly. He
asserted that in the run-up to deployment they were ‘totally unprepared’, in a
way that the UK should not have been, for what happened in the Balkans.
Neither decision-makers, nor local commanders understood the nature of the
conflict at the outset. At the beginning the main source of ‘information’ was
emotive television pictures from CNN and ITN which prompted knee-jerk
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reactions and public calls for intervention. He remembers one of the briefing
packs that were sent by the Foreign Office during his first weeks in Bosnia:
I can remember it quite clearly what flora and fauna I would find,
that lead-free petrol would be difficult to find (there was not a
single petrol station that had not been blown up by the time we
got there), what type of money would be used, not that there was
a bank because they had all been raided by then. To be honest,
we were living in the Dark Ages. We had militarily no
intelligence virtually, and certainly at the strategic level I do not
think the nation had much true understanding of the nature of the
conflict. I do not know at what stage we should have begun to
understand it, probably in the early stages of the Croatian/Serb
war that started at Vukovar or subsequently, I do not know, but
we did not understand the conflict when we deployed.10
This lack of understanding about the complexities fed into decision making at
all levels. One of the results was a desire to over-simplify the situation and
employ a reductionist labelling of factions as ‘good guys and bad guys’. Noone appreciated that on the ground, elements of two factions could be allies at
one point in the sector, but fighting each other ten miles down the road, largely
as a result of particular combinations of personalities or family relations.
Absence of intelligence contributed to a situation in which the UK did not
enjoy a clear consensus about why it joined UNPROFOR or an idea of what
would amount to success and thereafter what would comprise a well crafted
exit strategy.
For military planners at the strategic level, intelligence has always been vital to
try and extend the efficacy of thinly stretched forces attempting to cover too
much ground. Indeed, one of the most important ways in which intelligence and
the doctrine of low intensity operations connect is efficient use of resources.
This applies to military operations of all kind, but especially to low intensity
conflict where the ratio of security forces to problem can be very low. In
Ireland the UK forces often found that 16.000 troops were kept at full stretch by
only 300 active terrorists. UK operations in Northern Ireland absorbed between
20% to 33% of all UK infantry battalions at any one time between 1969 and
1993. Ireland and Bosnia together in the early 1990s pushed the British Army
to the limit and growing numbers of reservists had to be called in to fill the gap.
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The problem of efficiency continues to be central at a time when the British
Army has had to accept that it is unlikely ever to meet its current recruiting
targets.11
Intelligence quickly identified aspects of the situation in Ireland and Bosnia that
were linked to other areas of security. Most importantly, the factions proved to
have substantial links to organised crime. In Ireland extortion, bank-robbing
and petrol smuggling was widespread. Factions in Yugoslavia in particular
were almost without exception linked to organised crime including prostitution
and narcotics. In Bosnia it was important to know whether the local commander
that one was dealing with had a background as a sober Army officer or local
Mafioso. Ireland and subsequently Yugoslavia, re-affirmed the intense and
unseen linkage between the growing importance of ‘global issues’ such as
organised crime, drugs and illegal trafficking in light weapons on the one hand,
and local or regional conflicts on the other.12
Links to organised crime and light weapons trafficking underline the fact that
most low intensity operations have complex international dimensions.
Moreover the control of light weapons flows seems increasingly important in
conflict termination.13 Similar situations obtained in Ireland and Bosnia with a
view to arms supplies. Vast resources were deployed to enforce efforts to
prevent shipments of weapons, while the factions resorted to ingenuity to evade
them. In both cases, arms trafficking gave local conflicts an international
dimension. In Eire and the UK governments co-operated to cut off seaborne
weapons shipments to the factions in Ireland. Concerted intelligence work
uncovered a Libyan effort to provide aid to the IRA in the amount of 9 million
pounds sterling in the 1980s. They shipped 130 tons of weapons to the IRA
between 1985 and 1987. UK intelligence also supported the UN arms embargo
in Yugoslavia. This proved to be more complex because so many states, even
those who were troop contributing nations, who were legally committed to
enforcing the embargo, had their favourites amongst the factions and were
simultaneously turning a blind eye to the import of small arms or even helping
to circumvent the ban.
Ireland and Bosnia were therefore both local conflicts with a strong global
dimension. In the early years of the Ireland conflict UK intelligence was
dubious about the commitment of its American partners to preventing weapons
and money from reaching Republican factions, but as co-operation improved
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the FBI carried out some spectacularly successful arrests against Republicans
seeking to buy anti-aircraft missiles in the US. The IRAs decision to attack
British Army bases in Europe in the 1970s ensured that intelligence cooperation on this matter became NATO-wide. Over time substantial
programmes were built up with both the German security service BfV and the
Dutch security service BVD who ran agents against terrorist cells on the
Continent. Similarly, representatives of the factions in Bosnia were active on a
global scale.
Ireland and Bosnia both resulted in strains on the Anglo-American intelligence
relationship. In Bosnia, strategic intelligence exchange proved to be a major
problem as the political objectives of the two allies diverged. The United States
was clearly offering arms and assistance to the Bosnian Muslims and to the
Croatians on a large scale, often via third parties or via private military
companies. Germany also clearly favoured the Croatians and supplied them,
reviving old historic links to that part of Yugoslavia. The UK did not agree with
these illegal transfers. In 2002, the International Criminal Tribunal on the
former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was investigating the United States for its assistance
to military operations conducted by Croatia against rebel Serbian forces.
Admiral Davor Domazet, chief of Croatia’s military intelligence during the
country’s four-year war against secessionist Serbian guerrillas, was recently
questioned in Zagreb by two investigators from the ICTY and a representative
of the prosecutor’s office at The Hague. The investigators asked about the US
role in aiding Croatian forces in the 1993 Medak Pocket operation and the 1995
lightning offensive known as Operation Storm. It appears the real purpose of
the questioning was to investigate the role of US intelligence officials in these
operations, according to off the record comments by officials. The tribunal
investigators were interested in Croatia’s use of unmanned drones during
Operation Storm, which were especially effective in enabling Croatian military
forces to locate positions of rebel Serbs on the ground. The Hague investigators
also asked about Zagreb’s signals intelligence, high-powered satellite dishes
used for electronic surveillance that the Croatians reportedly received from the
US National Security Agency. It was reported that, during and after Operation
Storm, the CIA operated unmanned drones from a military base near Zadar on
the Adriatic coast. It has also been reported that the United States provided
encryption gear to each of Croatia’s regular army brigades and that Washington
shared extensive electronic surveillance data with Zagreb.14
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Where policy diverged, intelligence flow between allies slowed down. At the
strategic level, UK intelligence knew about, but preferred to ignore, the flow of
illegal arms to Bosnian Muslims. Cameron Spence, a member of the Special
Air Service (SAS) recalls the dismay of his superiors when his unit discovered
the extent and nature of arms transfers by their US allies. SAS units on the
ground in Yugoslavia contacted SAS in Germany who were located near the
US airfields where supplies were being shipped from. They noticed the
distinctive dress of those loading the crates into C-130s, ‘guys with shades and
earpieces wearing T-shirts’.15 In practice, the US seems to have been only part
of a wider programme which involved Germany, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran
and Pakistan in the airlifting of supplies to both the Bosnian Muslims and the
Croatians.16 Most memoirs of American officials from this period refer to the
US official proposal for ‘Lift and Strike’, lifting the embargo on arms to the
Bosnian Muslims and striking the Bosnian Serbs with airpower, pressed for by
US Secretary of State Warren Christopher in 1993. But they do not refer to the
covert implementation of this policy after it was rejected by European states
that same year.17
Differences of policy between Britain and the United States had a significant
impact upon the texture of the Anglo-American intelligence alliance.18 Reports
have circulated regarding the possible American interception of UK
communications in Bosnia, typically those of SAS units providing ground
observation. This is not unlikely for three reasons. First, the sheer antiquity
some of the UK communications equipment would have made this
straightforward. Second, the status of British troops as ‘UN Forces’ would have
put them into a grey category regarding US-UK Sigint agreements forbidding
the interception of each others traffic. Third, so many factions had such good
Sigint facilities that traffic intercepted by one element was often re-intercepted
by others as it was communicated. It is widely thought that signals intelligence
gathered by the Croats or the Bosnian Muslims may have been intercepted by
Bosnian Serbs. As one observer recalls ‘the Serbs were bugging the buggers’.
For a while London-Washington tensions were obvious, with a growing
reluctance to share information that bore directly on current political issues.19
Disputes over intelligence exchange in Bosnia were not dissimilar to Ireland.
Restrictions were lateral in terms of service or nation and also horizontal. In
Ireland, the intelligence services developed good technical and human
intelligence sources, but were reluctant to share this material widely,
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suspecting, quite rightly that there might well be penetration of government
offices by the paramilitaries. In Yugoslavia too, although the UK was deriving
good intelligence from both technical and human sources, distribution was
highly restricted. The UK sat on some of its own Humint and had its own Sigint
distribution system. General Sir Michael Rose was given a unit that resembled
the Second World War Special Communications Units for Ultra that were
attached to theatre commanders. In other words, a four-man team from the
Royal Signals deployed with very secure communications equipment to provide
Rose with high-grade intelligence which was absolutely not for circulation at an
operational level.20
That Rose’s office in the Residency at Sarajevo was being kept under technical
surveillance by both the Americans and the Bosnian Muslims has been asserted
by one of his staff, Milos Stankovic. Moreover, the general problems of
omnipresent surveillance have been alluded to by Rose. He recalls that sensitive
discussions about, for example, attempts to snatch war criminals had to be
conducted in a special room that had been comprehensively de-bugged.
Stankovic was suspicious of some of the high-grade communications
equipment given to Rose by US technicians whom he dubbed ‘The Hidden
Ones’. He complains of ‘their forest of antennae and funny boxes ... busy
hoovering up every bleep and fart, every single electronic emission to come out
of the Residency’. But as he himself concedes, security with the UNHQ was so
weak that Rose and his successor, General Rupert Smith, had long become
accustomed to working in an office which they assumed to be transparent.21
Remarkably, and despite these annoyances, strategic Anglo-American
intelligence exchange remained good. In Bosnia, the post-cold war intelligence
alliance was complex, with elements of mutual surveillance, but also with
genuine and substantial exchange that was vital to the fortunes of UNPROFOR.
While there were disagreements over factions, more important were issues of
intelligence distribution. High-grade Sigint and imagery from the United States
and the UK could not be passed to other allies and could not be passed beyond
Michael Rose’s immediate circle. His Director of Operations, General Sir
Roderick Cordy-Simpson, testified to the critical importance of the high-quality
intelligence he received from the Americans. Recalling his experience in
Bosnia, he argued that any type of difficult operation simply cannot, presently,
be undertaken without the United States’ support, if for no other reason than
their immense fighting power. He then added:
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They have also got something which is irreplaceable and that is
their intelligence capabilities. When I was in Bosnia there were
35 different nations providing intelligence to us. I would have to
say that I do not know the exact figure, but I would have thought
that somewhere around 70 per cent of the intelligence came from
two nations, ourselves and the Americans. The rest of the nations,
frankly, put very little into the pool. They took quite a lot out but
they put very little in to what we were getting. If we had not had
the Americans with their amazing capabilities, I think I for one
would simply not have survived. When I consider some of the
things that we were able to find out because the Americans had
the capability which no-one else had, we would have been in
dead trouble in any operation without them. … I would reemphasise time and time again that the intelligence which the
Americans brought with all their capabilities was something that
I know that as a commander on the ground I simply would not
have survived without. UK plc gave me a great deal but there
were masses of things I could not even have got from them.22
US Sigint capabilities in Yugoslavia were very good, as were the Sigint
capabilities of the various factions, but UK capabilities remain obscure.23
Conversely, as UNPROFOR was replaced by IFOR, the United States came to
admire and value sophisticated European Humint capabilities. The contrasting
approaches were not hard to see. American forces, being somewhat risk averse,
were required by their senior commanders to go on Humint missions in full
battle dress in convoys of no less than four vehicles, a procedure which did not
contribute much to clandestinity. Meanwhile, as American after-action reviews
have observed: ‘The United Kingdom had a great deal of background in these
types of operations based on its experiences in northern Ireland and, was able to
effectively apply this experience in Bosnia.’ This was especially noticeable in
the context of the G-2 element of Ace Rapid Reaction Corps, a UK-led
operation, which made substantial contributions to IFOR intelligence
activities.24
In the Bosnian case, much has been made of the problems of lateral flow, ally
to ally, and these were certainly severe. But in both Ireland and Bosnia the issue
of intelligence flow up and down the chain of command was no less crucial.
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Hierarchical military instincts combined with ‘need to know’ provision kept a
lot of good information at the top. But the nature of the operation muddled any
clear division among the strategic, theatre, and tactical levels. At the tactical
level, the deployed functional units contributed to the reconnaissance and
surveillance plans, to the intelligence reporting process, and to the synthesis of
information that painted the picture for the commanders. But in Bosnia, tactical
commanders at the brigade, battalion and company levels needed access to
political intelligence and so-called ‘strategic intelligence’25
As Cees Wiebes has pointed out, one of the disconcerting aspects of low
intensity operations is that tactical events often have strategic consequences.
Traditional military thinking tells us that three tanks moving down a road is a
tactical issue. But in the context of ethnic cleansing, it may be the preface an
event of world-wide significance. In other words, a disturbing blurring of levels
of analysis characterises intelligence for low intensity operations. Moreover the
‘CNN effect’ ensures that small events, seemingly selected at random and not
necessarily representative of the whole situation, often have a large impact on
public perceptions. The same has arguably been true of Ireland. The real
problem is how to move intelligence quickly and securely from a strategic level
to those who needed it at a lower echelon, or vice versa.26
Operations Intelligence at the Mid-level
At the operational level, existing UK military intelligence doctrine was found to
be inappropriate when troops arrived in Northern Ireland and later in Bosnia.
Extensive intelligence experience, albeit passed on by personal experience
rather than formalised training, in counter-insurgency intelligence operations in
Kenya, Malaya, Aden, Hong Kong, Cyprus, and many other colonial outposts,
was carried over directly into the first phase of activity in Ireland. But
unsurprisingly, the UK forces discovered they could not apply brusque colonial
approaches and methods due to the status of Northern Ireland as part of the
United Kingdom.
Specifically, the media were vigilant in Ireland, constituting a kind of informal
oversight and providing continuous commentary on modes of behaviour.
Accordingly, the UK had to abandon traditional techniques like ‘interrogation
in-depth’ because they soon aroused accusations of ‘torture’, which were
subsequently investigated by a special commission headed by Sir Edmund
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Compton. Widely publicised were methods of sleep deprivation and sensory
deprivation, including the use of hoods. Another technique widely used, but
less publicised, was simply to take a Republican suspect and drive him into a
Unionist area, acquaint the locals with the identity of the person in the car and
threaten to leave him alone for half an hour. There were also instances of
suspects being taken up in helicopters and confronted with the possibility of an
‘accidental fall’. In short, physical brutalisation was rare in Ireland, but
psychological torture was widespread. The uproar over using ‘interrogation indepth’ on prisoners caught UK military authorities off-guard since these
techniques had been taught at the Joint Services Intelligence School for some
time. Substantial efforts were taken to bring practices into line with public
expectations and thereafter, European legislation pushed the process of
regulation further.
Bosnia represented a further step in the direction of caution and correctness.
The level of media coverage in Yugoslavia was again high and intelligence
gathering activity was required to not only be benign but to be visibly benign,
indeed there was rarely any reference to intelligence at all. ‘Information’ was
gathered as a result of patrolling and interrogation was almost unheard of. This
was replaced by widespread interviewing of the local population who proved to
have, by word of mouth, remarkably good information about the local factions,
often as a result of family connections.
In both Ireland and Bosnia, UK forces had to acclimatise to environments in
which operations had not only to be successful in difficult circumstances, but
also in which any use of force had to be publicly justifiable in some detail. Real
precision was required if any military action was taken and in both cases the
need to demonstrate imminent threat was paramount. Here, experience in
Ireland seemed to prove valuable. UK forces were much better at assessing
tactical intelligence about imminent threats and were, at an individual level,
better at deciding whether the circumstances warranted the return of fire. This
experience allowed UK forces to defend themselves more confidently and led
to the local nickname for ‘Britbat’ becoming ‘Shootbat’, a tag that not all
commanders welcomed, but which added to their deterrent status.
In Ireland the actions of its personnel were individually accountable under the
provisions of UK law. Thus if a soldier exceeded his authority he might well be
charged and tried in a criminal court. (The Army objected to civil prosecution
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of military personnel and eventually the Government accepted that soldiers
would only appear in military courts.) Accordingly, UK forces issued ‘Yellow
Cards’ to each soldier to outline what could be done. For legal reasons these
rules of engagement were set below what the law allowed. This covered routine
situations, however, in practice the majority of armed confrontations between
paramilitaries and the Army occurred during intelligence-led operations and
involved special forces. For almost a decade, the SAS were involved in
maintaining covert observation over reported terrorist weapons dumps and,
once weapons were recovered from the dumps, the soldiers were permitted to
fire, and often did so. However, this led to a public outcry about ‘ambush’ and
this was exacerbated when mistakes were made when innocent civilians
approached the dumps.27
By the 1980s, the Army in Ireland found that it was under pressure to attack
terrorists only when they were actually on the way to an active operation. This
required a high level of sophistication in which the IRAs Active Service Units
were penetrated with human agents. Alternatively, the weapons in weapons
dumps were bugged with electronic equipment. This remarkable process,
known as ‘jarking’ a weapon, allowed the army to listen in to terrorists on their
way to attack a target. The epitome of this activity was the thwarted attack by
the IRA on a police station at Loughall in 1987. Nine IRA men died in a hail of
gunfire as they approached the target. However, the complexity of such
operations was underlined by the fact that one of the nine men killed was an
Army informer. Nor was this the only operation in which an informer was
eliminated by the security forces. Crucially, the sophistication of intelligence
operations was being driven not by military requirements, but by the need to be
publicly perceived as using force in a constrained and legitimate manner.28
Accordingly, UK forces were ready for the surreal situation in Bosnia where
forces could only fire on those who were actively attacking them, but not, for
example, when those forces were fleeing after having conducted an attack.
While wishing to be seen as having robust response capabilities, the
UNPROFOR rules of engagement were not robust. Air strikes were under a
bizarre ‘dual key’ arrangement in which required approval from both the UN
and NATO. The local joke was along the lines of ‘if you make a wrong move, I
will speak to my colonel who will ask the general to ask our national defence
minister to ask the prime minister to ask the rest of the UN to order me to open
fire, so be warned.’ Separating civilians from military in targeting for air
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attacks created an insatiable demand for the most detailed intelligence, often
provided by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or ‘drones’. But in both Bosnia, and
later in Kosovo, there was a grim acceptance that, even with the unprecedented
levels of intelligence provided by these new sources, avoiding all civilian
casualties would mean complete halt to air operations.29
Issues of legitimacy and the complexities of public relations were areas in
which the UK had learned painful lessons in Ireland. In both Ireland and
Yugoslavia, intelligence was able to support three primary goals for UK
information operations: First, winning public confidence (or at least reducing
hostility to UK military presence) through a ‘winning the hearts and minds’ or
at least, ‘winning passive acceptance’ campaign; second, countering
misinformation spread by the paramilitaries and by spontaneously generated
damaging rumours, and third, spreading misinformation to damage or
unbalance the paramilitaries. In peacekeeping, responses to direct and indirect
threats must be as much political/psychological as military. Intelligence is a
vital component of ‘soft’ political, economic, psychological, and moral power,
supported by information operations, careful intelligence work, and surgical
precision at the more direct military or police level.30
Intelligence speaks very directly to issues of public perceptions and the
legitimacy of force. In 2002, the UK released a dossier of intelligence material
which attempted to demonstrate that Iraq was in breach of UN requirements to
disarm and dispose of a range of weapons. The disclosure of this dossier,
effectively a sanitised Joint Intelligence Committee report, was hailed as
‘unprecedented’. In fact this was merely an incremental development of a trend
which had been emerging for more than twenty years and had its origins in
Ireland. Here a unit known as Information Policy was set up by intelligence
officers to influence public opinion. Periodically, sensitive intelligence material
was shown to journalists on an unacknowledged basis, where the Army felt that
its case for action had been strong, or where it felt that public criticism of an
operation was unjust. This process was continued in the context of Bosnia, and
later was clearly illustrated during the air war against Serbia. The UK
encountered great pressure to release intelligence, particularly imagery, to
inform public opinion. A major debate developed in which these public
pressures to release intelligence to show that targeting was discriminating and
effective was set against the need to maintain operational security. The growing
relationship between the secret world of intelligence and the very public world
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of media relations was one of the major lessons of the former Yugoslavia. After
conducting a retrospective review of all its intelligence activities in Yugoslavia
over a decade, the UK government has announced: ‘We are now looking to
streamline procedures for the sanitation, declassification and release of
intelligence into the public domain.’31 At the operational level, the SAS played
an important and sometimes controversial role in both Ireland and Yugoslavia.
The SAS were a vital resource for operational commanders on the ground. SAS
personnel began operating in Ireland selectively as individuals in 1971 and then
later as acknowledged SAS units in 1976. In Ireland they were employed in
intelligence gathering, reconnaissance and surveillance. But as Ireland became
an intelligence-led war the demand for SAS type operations became so great
that the SAS spent much time training regular UK military units in covert
observation techniques. They were also involved in ambushes and retaliatory
raids. A parallel process took place in which Army technicians were trained
widely by members of MI5 and GCHQ in technical aspects of surveillance.
This high-level training activity, which greatly expanded the covert capabilities
of the British Army as a whole, was an unseen but important change, taking
place over a period of several decades.32
In Bosnia, General Sir Michael Rose, the commander of UNPROFOR was keen
to have SAS at his disposal, in part because of his own period spent with the
regiment in Aden in the 1960s. In Bosnia much of their work involved
reconnaissance for the purpose of directing airdrops and air strikes. On 6 April
1994, SAS units penetrated Serb lines and directed air strikes against Serb
positions around the town of Gorazde. One of a team of seven was killed
withdrawing from these operations. On 30 August 1995 a similar SAS
operation took place to direct air strikes around Sarajevo. As early as 1994 the
SAS were being employed to find alleged war criminals. On 10 July 1997 a
Bosnian Serb wanted for war crime charges was killed and another man
arrested by a 10-man SAS squad. The operation, codename Tango, aimed at the
detention of Simo Drljaca and Milan Kovacevic by an SAS team in the area of
Prijedor, north-west Bosnia. The men were identified and tailed covertly before
being challenged. Drljaca offered resistance and was fatally wounded in the
exchange of fire.33
Despite the fact that UNPROFOR was an international operation, while Ireland
was an internal problem, issues of intelligence sharing at the mid-level were
remarkably similar. In Ireland, British Army intelligence was theoretically
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operating ‘in assistance of civil authorities’. This meant sharing intelligence
with the Special Branch & MI5 and SIS, which it did not enjoy. Periodic
tangles occurred between the various intelligence services and as early as 1979
Maurice Oldfield was despatched to Ireland as an Intelligence Co-ordinator to
try and unravel the confusion. But it was only in 1989 that the emergence of an
effective machine, known as Tasking and Control Groups, began to integrate
Army and police operations, preventing collisions on the ground or competition
for agents.34 For years, different elements of UK intelligence in Northern
Ireland behaved not unlike the National Intelligence Cells (NICs) in
UNPROFOR, sharing intelligence slowly, reluctantly and often on a horsetrading basis. In both Ireland and Bosnia, mechanisms were slowly evolved for
the sharing of some intelligence but this was never complete. In Bosnia, one of
the main contributors to the sense of frustration in the theatre was the sheer
number of intelligence entities, denoted by the presence of the ubiquitous
portakabin. Typically, in Sarajevo, there were perhaps a dozen NICs primarily
dedicated to providing intelligence that was releasable only to their own
national elements. At the level of the NIC, human intelligence often generated
by local forces was the stock-in-trade, while NATO-releasable Sigint was too
diluted to be of great value. Imagery was plentiful owing to the growing
number of platforms from which this was collected, including some
unconventional ones such as gun cameras. In Bosnia, material that was
circulated widely at the UN or even NATO level was regarded a being
effectively public domain.35
Intelligence support to factions is perhaps one of the most secretive, but
intriguing aspect of both Ireland and Bosnia. Over the last ten years it has
become increasingly clear that links between the British Army’s Force
Research Unit and the intelligence arm of some of the more violent protestant
paramilitaries were strong. Discussions have focused upon the role of Brian
Nelson, a former soldier planted on the paramilitaries who rose to be
intelligence co-ordinator for the UDA and became a conduit for passing Army
Intelligence on supposed IRA members to the UDA, who then took action. This
extraordinary state of affairs became very public when the UDA was accused of
eliminating the ‘wrong men’, and in order to substantiate their claims that they
had attacked the ‘right men’, duplicated and pasted Army intelligence
documents on the walls of Belfast. (The extent to which even terrorist
organisations were having to release targeting intelligence to the public, albeit
in an ersatz manner, to legitimate their activities was a startling aspect of this
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episode.)36 In Bosnia too, there were links to the intelligence components of
the factions, some of which have yet to be discussed. American intelligence
officials in Sarajevo hardly bothered to disguise their close relations with the
BiH Intelligence Chief in Sarajevo.37
In a more mundane sense, in both Ireland and Bosnia, intelligence became an
integrated part of preparation and training. In the early years, intelligence
training for service in Ireland was either non-existent at worst or haphazard at
best. The first deployments were intended as a short-term emergency measure
and it was only in 1973 that institutionalised learning began to materialise.
Eventually, the UK developed a procedure by which each battalion on orders to
go to Ireland would send an advanced intelligence party some weeks before the
main body arrived, to familiarise themselves with the situation on the ground as
well as to extract knowledge from the unit scheduled to rotate out. This was
important because in some areas the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s intelligencegathering capabilities were weak when the British Army intervened in 1969.
The Army had to start building its own intelligence system from scratch which
meant pouring in a large amount of effort. It was along time before the UK
received the full return on their investment in intelligence-gathering activities.
Intelligence was fed into purpose-built training areas for Ireland such as the
NITAT (Northern Ireland Training Team) facility at Sennelager in Germany.
The success of this influenced the decision to provide specialised training for
operations in Bosnia using a similar UNTAT (United Nations Training
Assistance Teams) facility at Westdown Camp on Salisbury Plain for
operations in Bosnia. But such activities take time to develop and short-notice
deployments to Kosovo, East Timor and Sierra Leone prevented the
development of full training packages and were characterised by the familiar
pattern of ‘learning on the job’ and limited prior intelligence. Good information
and training about local situations, customs and dispositions is essential when
dealing with factions whose armed elements are sometimes dressed in plain
clothes, making them indistinguishable from the local population. Poor briefing
or inadequate training can lead to grave mistakes, loss of life and associated
public humiliation.
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Intelligence on the Ground, the Micro Level
In both Ireland and Bosnia, units on the ground appreciated the importance of a
holistic approach to intelligence. Intelligence was vital to support even the
smallest units and every patrol devoted time and attention to intelligence
gathering. Patrols were often high-profile affairs whose main function initially
was to reassure public and to assert authority. In both environments, patrols
required intelligence support from covert observation points to reinforce their
security. Substantial numbers of covert observation posts had to be established
in order to reduce the number of patrol incidents. In Ireland, soldiers, often
trained by the members of the SAS, would lie in cover with binoculars, highpowered telescopes, and night vision devices for days or weeks on end in order
to observe specific individuals or areas. Such covert observation posts could
link with patrols in order to dominate an area. But the work exposed them to
attack if their location was uncovered by passing civilians. Patrolling in Bosnia,
and indeed later in Kosovo, presented some of the dilemmas experienced in
Ireland. Random patrolling produced little result and potentially exposed
patrols to unnecessary danger, because it was difficult to provide appropriate
support. By contrast, predictable and repetitive patrolling made it easier for
attackers to conduct ambushes. A varied pattern that was nevertheless coordinated allowed proper coverage of an area, and enabled commanders to have
patrols reinforce one another if necessary.
In both Ireland and Bosnia, tactical intelligence gathering was lent an additional
importance because the flow of intelligence from the higher echelons to those
on the ground was weak. Intelligence at ground level flowed up, but not down.
The ‘poor bloody infantry’ gathered a great deal of useful material but were not
well informed by higher echelons. Partly because of anxieties about
communication security, dedicated intelligence units tried to keep information
to themselves, or at least at a high level. Reviewing the Bosnian experience, the
UK authorities have concluded: ‘Commanders in theatre are already supplied
with good intelligence from the UK, but we are also looking at how best to
provide real-time information to the commanders and forces on the ground
about the disposition of their opponents, including intelligence material
obtained by Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance assets.’ In other
words, the issue is how to employ new technologies to extent the benefits of
high grade intelligence to those at the forward edge in a manner that is secure
and timely.38 At the battalion level the numbers devoted to full-time intelligence
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have been increasing. In Ireland the standard compliment of the battalion
intelligence section, 5 or 6 people, went up to 30 or 40 people. Most remained
in plain clothes throughout the units tour of duty. In Bosnia the picture was the
same, except that matters were complicated by the UN abhorrence of
‘intelligence,’ Instead Bosnia saw the setting up of ‘milinfo’ sections.
Eventually the UN became a little more relaxed about ‘intelligence’ if it was
gathered to enhance the mission directly.
Although both Ireland and Bosnia are often represented as intelligence efforts
dominated by individuals with binoculars and a notebook, technical intelligence
played a vital role even at a low level. In Ireland, fixed wing aircraft and
helicopters undertook vast amount of surveillance activity. The role of
helicopters in particular as surveillance platforms has been underplayed.
Helicopters not only carried cameras with very large aperture lenses with high
magnification, but also TV cameras. Arguably these platforms providing
television footage in real time (and known in local parlance as ‘Heli-tellies’)
were the direct predecessors of the drones that send live video feed back from
the mountainous areas of Yugoslavia.39
At all levels, one of the toughest lessons that UK forces had to learn in both
Ireland and Bosnia was that of COMSEC. Rigorous communications security is
essential, even against non-state enemies. So often the armies of states presume
that non-state or faction-based opponents will not resort to anything as
sophisticated as signals monitoring. IRA security and intelligence gathering
was good. British Army clear voice communications were being monitored by
the IRA in the early 1970s and later the British discovered that the IRA had
‘bugged’ telephones in British military headquarters. All the factions in Bosnia
gave a high priority to technical intelligence gathering.40 In Bosnia, British
Army COMSEC problems were multiplied by poor equipment. Conventional
military radios were unsuitable for urban operations. The British military
fulfilled some of their equipment needs with commercial off-the-shelf
technology including mobile phones, a bad habit. The poor intelligence flow to
the lower echelons was partly the product of the disastrous failure of the UK to
provide its forces with a modern radio system, a requirement that had dragged
on unfulfilled for years. The 1970s Clansman radio system used by the infantry
was an antiquarian relic and very insecure, but its long overdue replacement
had not arrived. There are few more glaring examples of front line units poorly
served by defence bureaucrats and procurement bunglers. Outdated
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communications systems also meant that signals staff were badly overstretched.
When UK forces first arrived in Bosnia, COMSEC was a disaster at every
level. General Sir Roderick Cordy-Simpson recalls: ‘When I was first out there
in Bosnia, I have never known a nightmare like it was in 1992. It was quicker
for me to drive the 12 miles to Phillip Morrillon's separate headquarters than it
would be to chance getting through to a telephone, which I would guarantee
was being listened to by all three sides. So it was much quicker to drive and
talk to him face to face.’41 Almost ten years later the UK was still being forced
to resort to stopgap measures. In October 1999, the UK began to install a
commercial protected communications system in Pristine, which overcame
some of the reliability and security shortcomings of the Clansman system. It
was announced in February 2000 that a contract had been let to provide wide
area communications in the UK sector in Kosovo, as well as in the UK sector in
Bosnia, providing modern and reliable communications. One of the repeated
lessons of the UK experience is the high cost of treating ‘COMSEC’ as a poor
relation, but there is no sign of this changing.42
Conclusion: Learning Lessons?
The literature of ‘lessons learned’ fills every staff college library to overflowing. Indeed the US Army has its own specialised outfit with the
pedagogical title ‘Centre for Army Lessons Learned’. Unsurprisingly, there is a
great deal of literature on Army experiences in Ireland, and increasingly on
Bosnia. But there is not much on lessons transferred. Moreover, there is little
literature on the problems of transferability of lessons between different types
of low intensity operations. This is a significant question for specialists on
intelligence and for observers of wider military issues. If there is a generic kind
of ‘low intensity operations intelligence’ then this process should be beneficial
and relatively unproblematic. But if different types of low intensity operation
have their own distinct qualities, then forces are confronted with business of
learning the parameters of each situation anew.
This chapter seeks to suggest that there is a generic low intensity operations
intelligence. Its doctrine is yet to explored and defined. Yet its salient points are
already observable and indeed to some extent obvious. Typically, local
geographical knowledge and linguistic skills are going to be critical in all such
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operations in the future. When separating the Bosnian Croats and Bosnian
Muslims in Central Bosnia, local issues could often be resolved with prior
knowledge of historical perspectives and emotive locations such as graveyards
and former battle sites. The same is true in Ireland Personalities are a critical
aspect of the intelligence picture for every commander and the challenge is
acquiring this sort of local knowledge at an improbable speed. In Ireland the
UK forces had the luxury of more than 30 years to learn their craft. Having
been in Yugoslavia for more than ten years, UK forces are learning a local trade
there too. But few low intensity operations have this sort of duration, how are
the emergency deployments to be accommodated?
A comparison of Ireland and Bosnia also has interesting insights for academic
observers of intelligence, in the area of alliance and liaison. At first glance
Bosnia seems quite different from Ireland in this regard. But on closer
inspection, Bosnia was often like Ireland, with national intelligence operations
running in parallel, characterised at best by controlled bilateral sharing.
Accordingly, experiences in Ireland, a unilateral environment, will continue to
inform UK intelligence operations even in the context of multinational or
international operations, because of the dependence upon national intelligence
systems and the absence of anything that might be called ‘UN intelligence’.
Indeed, perhaps the divide here is not between national operations and
multilateral/international operations, but instead between the two worlds of the
academic and the practitioner.43 The academic literature on intelligence and
peacekeeping support has continually bemoaned the mismatch between the
multinational or international character of the forces provided by UN or NATO
and the fissiparous nature of intelligence provided through national
‘stovepipes’. There have been repeated calls for an expansion of UN
intelligence and for states to become accustomed to pooling sensitive
intelligence while developing more confidence in the UN’s ability to handle
this material efficiently and discreetly.44 But a close reading of the practitioner
literature reveals that intelligence was not particularly out of step with the real
nature of operations in Bosnia, or elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia.
Intelligence flows often followed the composition of the forces, which were
themselves often operating as de facto national units with hidden national
vetoes. General Wesley Clark captured this succinctly in his perceptive memoir
when he talked about the increasingly open ‘dirty secret’ of NATO operations.
He asserts: ‘NATO commands were like puppets, with two or six or sometimes
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dozens of strings being pulled from behind the scenes by the nations
themselves, regardless of the formalistic commitment of forces. Commanders
were subject to constant scrutiny and potential veto by contributing nations.’ He
continues: ‘This was practice that had originating with UN forces in Bosnia
called “red carding” where nations temporary withdrew their forces and refused
to participate in operations ordered by higher commanders. All UN and NATO
forces were in practice national forces.’ If troop contributing nations continue
to regard their forces as their ‘own’ and feel at liberty to backslide on decisions
taken centrally when they feel so inclined, as some have done in Yugoslavia,
we have a situation of parallel national operations rather than international or
multilateral operations. In such a situation, one can hardly hope for anything
other than parallel national intelligence support.45
Endnotes
1
I am indebted to Alice Hills, Vanessa Pupavac and others for comments and
suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.
2
For literature that discusses a specific peacekeeping intelligence see: Hugh Smith,
‘Intelligence and UN Peacekeeping’, Survival 3 (1994) pp.174-94; A.W. Dorn and
David J.H. Bell, ‘Intelligence and Peacekeeping: The UN Operation in the Congo,
1960-64’, International Peacekeeping 1 (1995) pp.11-33; David Ramsbotham,
‘Analysis and Assessment for Peacekeeping Operations’, Intelligence and National
Security 4 (1995) pp.162-174; Paul Johnston, ‘No Cloak and Dagger Required:
Intelligence Support to UN Peacekeeping’, Intelligence and National Security 4 (1997)
pp.102-112; Thomas Quiggin, ‘Response to `No Cloak and Dagger Required:
Intelligence Support to UN Peacekeeping Missions’, Intelligence and National Security
4 (1998) pp.203-207; A.Walter Dorn, ‘The Cloak and the Blue Beret: Limitations on
Intelligence in UN Peacekeeping’, International Journal of Intelligence and
Counterintelligence 4 (1999) pp. 414-447.
3
David Kahn, ‘A Historical Theory of Intelligence’, Intelligence and National Security,
3 (2001) pp.79-93.
4
Thomas R. Mockaitis, ‘From Counterinsurgency to Peace Enforcement: New Names
for Old games?’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 2 (1999) pp.41-57.
5
Todd Landman, Issues and methods in comparative politics (London: Routledge
2000) pp.23-77.
6
On UK intelligence and earlier low intensity operations see: K. Jeffery, ‘Intelligence
& Counter-Insurgency Operations’, Intelligence & National Security 1 (1987) pp.118150; Richard Popplewell, ‘Lacking Intelligence: Some Reflections on Recent
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Approaches to British Counter–Insurgency, 1900–1960’ Intelligence & National
Security 2 (1995) pp.336-346.
7
Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (Yale University Press: Yale 1992).
8
As early as 1972, SIS officer Frank Steele, together with officials from the Northern
Ireland Office, met with Gerry Adams to attempt to negotiate a cease-fire, PREM
15/1009, Public Record Office. His successor was Michael Oatley, see Peter Taylor,
Brits: The War Against the IRA (London: Bloomsbury 2001) pp.67-70.
9
Max G. Manwaring, ‘Peace and Stability Lessons From Bosnia’, Parameters: Journal
of the US Army War College4 (1998) pp.28-38.
10
UK House of Commons, Select Committee On Defence, Examination of Witnesses
(Questions 220 - 242), Wednesday 3 February 1999, evidence from Lt General Sir
Roderick Cordy-Simpson KBE CB, Director of Operations.
11
The British Army has been between 8,000 and 12,000 short of its recruiting targets
for several years, Tania Branigan, ‘Sisters in Arms’, Guardian 12 February 2001.
12
The SIS global issues section was set up in the 1990s, Mark Urban, UK Eyes Alpha
inside British intelligence (London: Faber and Faber, 1996) p.229.
13
J. Spear, ‘The Disarmament and Demobilisation of warring Factions in the Aftermath
of Civil Wars’, Civil Wars 2 (1999) pp.1-22.
14
Jeffrey T. Kuhner, ‘Tribunal Probes U.S. Aid To Croatia’, The Washington Times, 6
December 2002.
15
Cameron Spence, All Necessary Measures (London: Michael Joseph 1998) pp.102104.
16
J. Spence; ‘Ex-ISI Chief Reveals Secret Missile Shipments to Bosnia defying UN
Embargo’, Special SAT Report South Asia Tribune, Issue No 22, December 23-29,
2002. I am indebted to Mazhar Aziz for bringing the latter to my attention.
17
For example General Wesley K. Clark, Waging Modern War (NY: Public Affairs
Press 2001) pp.97-98. Richard Holbrooke asserts that the United States ‘played no role’
in the covert assistance but could not object to it at a time when the survival of the
Sarajevo government ‘hung by a thread’, R. Holbrooke, To End a War (NY: The
Modern Library 1998) p.51.
18
Richard C. Holbrooke identifies the Summer of 1994 as the low point in AngloAmerican relations, Holbrooke, To End a War, p.333.
19
Milos Stankovich, Trusted Mole: A Soldier’s Journey into Bosnia’s Heat of Darkness
(London: Harper Collins 2000) pp.250-252
20
Urban, UK Eyes Alpha, pp.210-219.
21
Stankovich, Trusted Mole, pp.252-253. See also Sami Fournier, Tasos Kokkinides,
Daniel Plesch, and Richard Thomas, 'Implementing Dayton: Arms Control and
Intelligence in Former Yugoslavia', BASIC PAPERS: Occasional papers on
International Security Policy, (March 1996) No.15.
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22
UK House of Commons, Select Committee On Defence, Examination of Witnesses
(Questions 220 - 242), Wednesday 3 February 1999, evidence from Lt General Sir
Roderick Cordy-Simpson KBE CB, Director of Operations. In the same session
Professor Thornberry remarked: ‘On the intelligence side also, it has to be said that
certainly again in South West Africa in Namibia without American backing at that
level, working in the joint commission on the intelligence side in South Western Africa,
we would have been in very, very serious trouble.’
23
Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia: 1992-1995. (Berlin and London:
Lit Verlag) pp.219-310, passim.
24
Larry K. Wentz, (ed.) Lessons from Bosnia: The IFOR Experience, National Defense
University: Viena, VA 1997) Chapter IV: ‘Intelligence Operations’; see also C. Agee,
‘Joint STARS in Bosnia: Too Much Data, Too Little Intel?’, Military Intelligence, 4
(1996) pp.6-10, 40-41; and L.T.C. Perkins, ‘Humint/CI’, Office of DCSI at
http://call.army.mil/products/spc prod/humint/humint.htm (accessed in January 2003).
25
Wentz, (ed.) Lessons from Bosnia.
26
UK House of Commons, Select Committee on Defence, Examination of Witnesses
(Questions 880 - 902), Wednesday 17 May 2000, evidence from Sir John Goulden and
Vice-Admiral Paul Haddacks.
27
General Sir Peter de la Billiere, Looking for Trouble: SAS to Gulf Command
(London: HarperCollins 1994) p.315.
28
Mark Urban, Big Boys Rules, the secret struggle against the IRA (London: Faber
1992) pp.224-237. Also private information.
29
Clark, Waging Modern War, pp.299-300.
30
R.R. Smith, ‘Psychological Operations in the Return to Normality in BosniaHerzegovina’, British Army Review (1996) pp.114, 13-18; T.D. LaBahn, ‘Information
Operations in Bosnia’, FA Journal 6 (2001) pp.32-37; Thomas K. Adams,
‘Psychological Operations in Bosnia’, Military Review 6 (1999) pp.29-37; S. Collins,
‘Army PSYOP in Bosnia: Capabilities and Constraints’, Parameters 2 (1999) pp.5773.
31
MoD Report, ‘Kosovo: Lessons from Crisis’ (London: HMSO, June 2001) para 6.33.
32
Tony Geraghty, The Irish War: The Hidden Conflict between the IRA and British
Intelligence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins 2000) pp.154-173.
33
Tim Butcher, ‘SAS kills Serb war crime suspect and grabs another’, Daily Telegraph,
11 July 1997.
34
Martin Dillon, The Dirty War: Covert Strategies and Tactics Used in Political
Conflicts (London: Routledge, 1990) p.425.
G.K. Gramer, Jr., ‘Operation Joint Endeavor: Combined-Joint Intelligence in
Peace Enforcement Operations’, Military Intelligence, 4 (1996) pp.11-14.
35
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36
More on this complex case continues to spill into the public domain, see Ed
Moloney, ‘Panorama missed the real story of collusion in Ulster’, Daily Telegraph, 25
June 2002.
37
Stankovich, Trusted Mole, p.251.
38
MoD Report, ‘Kosovo: Lessons from Crisis’, paras 6.33, 8.26.
39
L. Shiner, ‘The Air Force's latest remotely operated reconnaissance marvel gets its
first real-world test in the skies over Bosnia’, Air And Space Smithsonian (2001) 16, 1:
48-57.
40
Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia.
41
UK House of Commons, Select Committee On Defence, Examination of Witnesses
(Questions 220 - 242), Wednesday 3 February 1999, evidence from Lt General Sir
Roderick Cordy-Simpson KBE CB, Director of Operations.
42
MoD Report, ‘Kosovo: Lessons from Crisis’ paras 6.33, 8.26.
43
Christopher Hill and Pamela Beshoff (eds.), Two Worlds of International Relations:
Academics, Practitioners and the Trade in Ideas (London: Routledge, 1994).
44
Smith, ‘Intelligence and UN Peacekeeping’, p.184
45
Clark, Waging Modern War, pp.404-405.
99